You would think that after years of covering London Film Festival, I wouldn’t get lost so easily. And yet, if you had eyes on Waterloo Station the day I set out to see “Julián,” that’s what you’d see: a lanky, bespectacled film critic stumbling past roadblocks and protests to find the concrete halls of the BFI set against the River Thames.
Fortunately, no one makes the journey worthwhile quite like Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, and “Julián”—a powerful debut from director Louise Bagnall—easily solidified its place as my favorite film of the festival.
Based on a storybook by Jessica Love, “Julian” immediately exudes pure joy writ in bright colors, deliciously evocative animation, and a melodic soundtrack. Bagnall revealed in the Q&A that hundreds of background drawings were produced using colored pencils and markers to put us in child protagonist Julián’s shoes. All of this complements a moving and invigorating story about queer identity set against the backdrop of Dominican-American culture and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.
The film echoes Cartoon Saloon’s best work, weaving family drama and self-discovery with cultural and religious magic. Gone are the forest fairies and wolfwalkers of the Emerald Isle; instead, Julián (played pitch-perfectly by nine-year-old Knyght Darius Jack) is helped along by a blue sprite named Luna and the Yoruba goddess Yemayá. Together, these entities help Julián accept who he is and share his light with his family. The project feels essential given the current political climate around gender and queerness without ever being didactic.
Watching Julián’s father drop him off at his grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, I couldn’t help but be reminded of when my mother did the same for me. I treasured the chance to connect with my grandmother across multiple generations, to learn about the ins and outs of her little corner of Brooklyn: her favorite restaurants, her local grocery store, her love for the promenade. This is where “Julián” really sings. Bagnall and her team created as authentic a depiction of neighborhood life as Spike Lee did in “Do the Right Thing”—no mean feat for a team working from across the Atlantic Ocean.
Where “Julian” had me levitating out of my seat with nostalgic memories of New York, “Variations on a Theme” evoked an entirely different part of my past. It was almost startling to hear a film boldly open in Afrikaans, my father’s first but rarely spoken language.
I was immediately hooked as narrator and co-director Jason Jacobs launched into a story about Black South Africans who fought in World War I and II but who never received meaningful compensation, an unfortunate echo of unfulfilled promises of “forty acres and a mule” in the US. Not all veterans received such poor treatment, of course. Later in the film, we learn that one Black soldier received a bicycle as payment while his white peers received homes.
Yet these somber trappings belie the film’s whimsical soul. “Variations” offers a funny, ardently deadpan snapshot of life in the Northern Cape village of Kamieskroon. As we meet each of our main characters, fleeting as they are, we learn they are descendants of World War soldiers still waiting for government veterans’ grants. We see them caught in a Kafka-esque cycle of blue form applications, processing fees, and perpetual delays. One character, Hettie (Hettie Farmer), hopes in vain that a new administration under Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa’s sitting president) will bring change.
Jacobs and co-director Devon Delmar oscillate between locked-down shots of donkeys, an old man sleeping against a building, locals playing dominoes, and Hettie the goat herder overseeing her flock. This approach pairs with utterly naturalistic performances, giving the film a feeling of raw authenticity.
Jacobs’ vignette-like narration imbues each scene with meaning. He tells us that one of the donkeys staring passively at the camera tried to escape through a barbed-wire fence the night before, causing intense distress; in the same matter-of-fact tone, he confides elsewhere that Hettie wonders whether her flock of goats considers her a caring mother or a slaughtering god.
Neither backstory appears visually, but it breathes a hidden life into each character, much like a documentary might. Yet the veneer of realism cracks when Jacobs and Delmar create a particularly striking image: a World War veteran ancestor visiting Hettie astride a bicycle, powerfully connecting the denizens of Kamieskroon to a country that has left them behind.
I actually visited South Africa in two wildly different contexts at LFF: in “Variations,” I saw the country in the modern era, and in “Tutu,” I was invited on a multi-decade march toward the end of apartheid. Director Sam Pollard offers a compelling and often inspiring documentary portrait of the eponymous archbishop. We follow one of the most significant civil rights leaders in South Africa’s history as he prophesies, then fulfills, his dream of liberating the country from racial repression.
It’s a movie that feels deeply salient today, as communities on opposite sides of a deeply traumatizing and violent fence work together to build a new future. The parallels to Israel-Palestine are immediately obvious, although the film spends surprisingly little time on the connection despite Tutu’s passion for making peace in the region.
Pollard wisely avoids hagiography. He depicts Tutu as a powerful speaker and devoted husband, but also as a man sometimes at odds with his own movement. Tutu’s commitment to nonviolence marks him as a collaborator and traitor to liberation, in contrast to African National Congress figureheads.
In the most harrowing sequence of the film, anti-apartheid protesters attempt to “necklace” someone they deem to be an informant to the government—a shocking tactic that involves putting car tires around a person, dousing them in gas, and lighting them on fire. Tutu puts his own life in jeopardy by standing in between the mob and the target. For the archbishop, Pollard suggests, this was a fight for the movement’s soul.
Later in the film, Pollard includes an interesting sequence in which Tutu lays out the extent of his Christian ethic. He explains to a Jewish friend that he believes everyone, even someone like Adolf Hitler, could find salvation and forgiveness if they sought it out and repented. Tutu uses this controversial belief to illustrate that apartheid government leaders could have a place in the new South Africa if they would just admit to their crimes through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Some officials took Tutu up on that offer; many did not. But ultimately, Tutu believed that sitting down and talking things through is the first and most essential step in repairing harm and rebuilding connection.
Some conflicts have no resolution, as it is in “A Common Story,” a promising debut from Italian actor-turned-director Anna Foglietta. The movie deftly explores gender dynamics through the lives of married couple Erika (Alba Rohrwacher) and Mauro (Guido Caprino). The film opens with the pair seeing their daughter off to college, and empty-nest life reveals a slew of problems in their relationship.
Facing down issues previously ignored for the sake of a shared goal, like child-rearing, isn’t anything new. But what grabbed me about “A Common Story” was its clever bait-and-switch storytelling. We first see Erika rebuff Mauro’s attempts to start a romance, alongside his kind efforts to coach local kids in soccer. We see him reject the boorish, sexist nature of his father’s generation with a sense of deep embarrassment.
Foglietta gives us the impression that Mauro is just a nice guy stuck in a loveless relationship. But as the film shifts perspective, we see another side to Mauro. He’s just as stuck in old gender norms: demanding his food be ready on the table when he comes home and neglectful of Erika’s needs. There is a subtle commentary here on a younger generation of Italian men who believe they’ve shed regressive mores, only to reinstate them when push comes to shove.
It’s unfortunate that Foglietta seems unwilling to allow her muses to carry the day with the compelling central message. Rohrwacher and especially Caprino are up to the task. But as the drama reaches a fever pitch, Foglietta gets in the way with garish crossfades and almost soap opera-like zooms. These distracting choices make what should be a powerful denouement feel almost silly with melodrama. It is a testament to the underlying truth of “A Common Story” that I would still recommend the film despite these strange choices, and I look forward to seeing what a now-experienced Foglietta can do in a follow-up.
The critic Pauline Kael once said, “An artist must either give up art or develop.” It seemed fitting that I would be seated in the Kael screening room at Picturehouse Central to watch Duncan Jones’ sci-fi war film, “Rogue Trooper,” because this is an important moment for Jones.
After bursting onto the scene with the modern classic “Moon” in 2009 and following it up with the wonderful time-loop film “Source Code,” Jones hit a rut. His last film, “Mute”—set in the same universe as “Moon”—proved to be a distasteful, unmitigated disaster. “Rogue Trooper” is his chance at a comeback, and while it has its flaws, I’m glad he chose to develop rather than give up.
The animated epic follows a soldier named 19 (Aneurin Barnard) who belongs to an elite caste of soldiers whose consciousness is stored on a removable chip. That means that if they die, they can live on in a new body or other available machinery.
While 19 and his brothers in arms are relatively unremarkable characters when they have bodies, the fates conspire to transplant each of his platoon into a different bit of his equipment: Gunnar (Jack Lowden) ends up in his gun, Helm (Daryl McCormack) in his helmet, and Bagman (Reece Shearsmith) in his backpack. Ironically, this shift away from living, breathing people helps the whole cast come to life and compelled me to see 19’s mission to its high-octane conclusion. I only wish it came sooner after such a dreary opening sequence.
Part of what makes “Rogue Trooper” hard to get into is its lifeless, often uncanny animation. The film uses Unreal Engine 5, a popular software for creating video games, to weightless effect. I found myself wishing for a more traditionally animated film or live action; what we get instead fails to capture the highly stylized art of the 2000 AD Rogue Trooper comics.
Despite this, robust vocal performances from 19 and his disembodied misfit companions won me over enough that I would be keen to see a sequel, particularly with this character’s setup out of the way.
On the other end of the animation spectrum is Fernanda Salgado’s extremely watchable “Ana, en passant.” The movie mixes media, including stop motion, collage, hand-drawn animation, rotoscoping, and even stylized live-action video, to create a textured, expressive world for its lead character.
The movie follows Ana (Jéssica Pierina) as she leaves her home in Paris to follow a cryptic clue her Brazilian grandmother left behind. When she arrives at her grandmother’s old apartment, Ana meets a woman named Alice (also Pierina), who lets her stay while she explores the town.
“Ana, en passant” offers a subtler, more consistent take on the Afro-Brazilian notion of “spiral time,” also explored in 2024’s “Formosa Beach.” Salgado lets the film’s narrative fold in on itself repeatedly. Ana and Alice come across as very similar people, helped by having the same voice actor, raising questions about how much of what Ana is experiencing is real.
Alice also shares the same name as Ana’s grandmother, hinting that Ana is somehow staying with a younger version of her deceased relative. These interwoven abstract interpretations offer no easy answers but invoke a unique, culturally distinct narrative mode that feels refreshing.
In key ways, “Ana, en passant” shares DNA with both “Olivia and the Clouds”—my standout pick of the fest—in how it plays with form and sound to explore family ties and history. The film’s deeply evocative soundtrack comes from Brazilian jazz band Metá Metá; Salgado revealed in a Q+A that she listened to the band as she developed the film over ten years, so they were a natural fit for the final treatment.
Salgado mixes their sometimes bouncy, sometimes otherworldly tunes with a deep sense of aural tactility through sound effects and foley. As Ana picks up a fruit from a street vendor, it rips away, revealing the film’s very canvas; meanwhile, city buildings unfurl as she walks by, as if hastily assembled by the filmmaker. Together, these elements create an almost ethereal sense of constructed reality as Ana pieces her family history back together.
In some ways, attending London Film Festival puts me in a similarly dreamlike state. Flitting from film to film can create a transfixing stupor as the reels begin to blend. Did I not just meet Hettie the goatheard? Was Metá Metá really providing a personal soundtrack to my life? I can but duck into just one more theater to find out.
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